What She Said: Pooja Nansi on reconciling her identity as a Singaporean woman

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This question in its entirety is as hard for me to answer as its parts, which are: “What does it mean to be a Singaporean?” and “What does it mean to be a woman?” 

The first question has always been a particularly complicated one for me. You see, I don’t fall into any of the neat, known categories of Singaporeans. I came to Singapore with my Gujarati immigrant parents in 1983 when I was 18 months old. Nobody knew what Gujarati was in my primary school (Gujarat is, in fact, a state in the Western part of India). Imagine being a seven-year-old attempting to explain to your classmates that yes, you are Indian; no, you do not speak Tamil; no, there is no such language as Indian; no, Hindu is not a language either; and no, not all Indians speak Tamil, even though the Social Studies textbook you read in first period suggests otherwise. 

Singapore is the city I grew up in. It is a city I deeply love. It is where I played five stones with my classmates on the canteen floor in a little neighbourhood primary school,  where I had my first kiss in a corner of Marina Square that no longer exists post shiny refurbishment, where I spent ladies’ nights drinking too much with my friends in dingy clubs in Boat Quay that no longer exist, because they’ve made way for overpriced restaurants aimed at tourists. Singapore is so firmly home, but the answer to what it means to be Singaporean still doesn’t come easy. Not when I feel my body flinch each time a taxi driver asks me if I am Singaporean, and responds to my “yes” with a “you don’t look local” or “oh, but were you born here?” I also couldn’t tell you what I could do to be more Singaporean. Apparently even speaking Malay, our National Language, fluently doesn’t really exempt me from suspicion. 

Then there’s the question of what it means to be a woman, more specifically a Singapore woman. No aspect of womanhood is a monolith. We are such complex, diverse individuals, and my experience of womanhood is probably vastly different from yours. My experience of womanhood in this city involves being in a body that doesn’t quite fit into its beauty ideals. I’m a little too curvy, a little too round, a little too hairy, a little too brown. I don’t think I grew up seeing myself reflected positively in images anywhere in this country. 

But part of claiming this city as home is believing that things can change for the better. That my little round, brown half-Gujarati, half-Tamil daughter can grow up in a different kind of city than the one I did. That maybe she won’t have to explain away all the different, specific parts of herself in order to fit into neat but narrow state-defined categories that never had a shot at encompassing lived experiences. 

I pray that this city and our rhetoric around identity catches up eventually with all the beautiful diversity that actually defines it. I pray that in 20 years, someone like me, when asked what being a Singapore woman means to her, can respond with a single word: belonging.

What She Said is a column where we invite Singapore's most prominent writers to pen their thoughts on today's pressing topics

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